An empirical analysis of the evolution of user-visible features in an integrated development environment

ABSTRACT

Programmers spend much of their time interacting with Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), which help increase productivity by automating much of the clerical and administrative work. Like any useful software, IDEs are becoming more powerful and usable as new functionality is added and usability concerns addressed. In particular, the last decade has witnessed the rapid and steady growth of features and enhancements (changes) in major Java IDEs. It is of research interest to learn about the characteristics of these changes as well as salient patterns in their evolution trajectories as these can be useful to understand and guide both the design and evolution of similar systems. To this end, a total of 645 "What's New" entries in seven releases of the Eclipse IDE were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively under two models. Using the first, an activity-based, functional model, it is found that the vast majority of the changes are refinements or incremental additions to the feature architecture set up in early releases (1.0 and 2.0). Using the second, a usability-based model, a detailed usability analysis was performed to further characterize these changes in terms of their potential impact on how effectively programmers use the IDE. Findings and implications as well as results of selective comparison with two other popular IDEs are reported.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • Development frameworks and environments

      • Integrated and visual development environments